What A Deal

Cleaner Water, For Just A Few Dollars A Month

November 14, 2007

Cleaner water for the price of a super- value meal?

That's what the Hampton Roads Sanitation District offers with its plan for cutting pollution from its sewage treatment plants - a good deal. The utility, which serves southeastern Virginia, will significantly reduce its contribution to the poor health of the James, York and Rappahannock rivers and Chesapeake Bay. And the cost, to be covered by all of us who are customers, is affordable.

The immediate need is to cut, significantly, the nutrients - nitrogen and phosphorous - that pour into Virginia rivers and bays in treated waste water. Nitrogen and phosphorous aren't toxic, but they're major contributors to one of the biggest problems undermining the health of the bay and rivers. They feed algae, which creates huge "blooms" and robs the water of oxygen, creating dead zones and making life difficult for other marine creatures and the underwater grasses they depend on.

The HRSD has to do its part to help Virginia reach the pollution-reduction goals it nailed down, at long last, a few years ago. For each river system, like the James and York, scientists figured out the maximum load of nutrients that can be accommodated and maintain a healthy ecosystem. Those overall targets have been broken down into allocations for each sewage treatment plant and other polluter.

To reach its goals, the HRSD will have to spend about $750 million for projects like the upgrade to the expanding York River treatment plant. That sounds like a huge number, until you realize that on a per-household, per-month basis, it's really quite affordable.

The first increment, which raised bills, on average, $2 per month per household, went into effect in July. Did you even notice? It's a small ding in most household budgets - cleaner water for less than the price of a latte per month. As the upgrades roll out, there will be more hikes in the next few years, until it comes to about $6 per household per month. Like we said: cleaner water for the price of a super-value meal.

This is user fees at their simplest. Those who create the waste that causes water quality problems pay to clean it up. In the case of the pollution caused by sewage treatment plants, the generators include every household that flushes toilets and runs dishwashers and every industry that dumps stuff down the drain.

Getting users involved in cleaning up their own messes means less of the burden is passed on to general taxpayers. It's a targeting strategy popularized by Ronald Reagan, which still makes fiscal sense.

There are some taxpayer-funded grants available for water quality clean up, thanks to the money set aside by the General Assembly in the recent fiscally happy years, and bonds Virginia is selling. The HRSD will apply for grants, and its customers would expect it to. But, really: Does it make sense to expect taxpayers in, say, Roanoke, to pick up the bill for pollution generated in Hampton and York County?

The more pollution-cutting upgrades to sewage treatment plants are paid for by the people who generate the sewage, the more taxpayer-funded grants will be available for projects that can't be funded any other way. This includes sewage treatment plants and problematic sewer systems where the scale of the problem exceeds what local users can pay. And for another, big need: cutting run-off of nitrogen, other pollution and sediment from farms. Some big farmers can afford to build fences and plant buffers and winter cover crops, but small operators need help to reduce their contribution to Virginia's impaired waterways - and most of Virginia's streams, lakes, rivers and bays are, indeed, seriously impaired by pollution.

Self-funding also means that plant upgrades, and progress restoring the health of those waters, don't run aground during the years - and there are many of them - when the General Assembly doesn't find money for water quality projects.

The HRSD doesn't have to make a big investment in every plant, thanks to a feature of Virginia's nutrient reduction plan called cap-and-trade. The state set limits, or caps, on how much pollution each major river can handle. Polluters can make trade offs among plants within that river system to get to that cap.

If HRSD cuts enough pollution from one plant, like the problematic James River plant in Newport News, it can get away doing less at another plant, like the one at Newport News' Boat Harbor, which is so hemmed in there's no space to install the apparatus for large-scale clean up. Cap-and-trade is a sensible, pragmatic way to solve the problem, one that's applicable to some (but not all) other pollution problems, like the emission of carbon dioxide.